Author: admin

Maternal Mortality and PHM — Part 2

Since the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report titled “Maternal Health: Outcomes Worsened and Disparities Persisted During the Pandemic,” I thought this would be a good opportunity to write the promised follow-up to my first blog post about maternal mortality and population health. After doing further research since I first published that […]

Vox Populi

Can a population health approach to healthcare exist beyond the bounds of organized medicine and public health? Technically, at least right now, the answer appears to be no. Although there is no single agreed-upon definition of population health, the one many point to was posited by Kindig and Stoddart in their seminal 2003 paper titled […]

Social Prescribing

I recently learned about an approach to addressing negative social determinants of health (SDOH) called “social prescribing,” and it has the potential to be a complete game-changer. The movement, if I can call it that, seems to have caught fire in places like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and, to a lesser extent, the […]

Payment Models and Metrics

Healthcare quality measures are a study in contrasts. Their overall purpose is straightforward enough: quality measures incentivize physicians and other healthcare workers to provide cost-effective care that ideally leads to better patient outcomes. But the sheer number of them can seem overwhelming. What’s more, figuring out the interplay between these measures and healthcare payment models […]

Quality Measure Development

I’ve been looking into how to develop Patient-Reported Outcomes-based Performance Measures (PRO-PMs) lately, and I figured I’d list some helpful resources here. Quality metrics are important in medicine, in that they incentivize physicians to accomplish the IHI Triple Aim: Improving the patient experience of care (including quality and satisfaction); Improving the health of populations; and […]

Maternal Mortality and PHM — Part 1

By now you’ve likely heard that the U.S. leads all wealthy nations in terms of maternal mortality rates. This statistic is hard to swallow, especially since two in three such complications are preventable. Given that the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, these outcomes are clearly not acceptable. We spend more per person […]

What Is a Health Insurance Exchange?

For the newest installment in my “What is…?” series, I’d like to explore what a health insurance exchange is. Health insurance exchanges, a.k.a. health insurance marketplaces, have been in the news as of late because a couple of programs enacted to help Americans get through the COVID pandemic, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of […]

Insurance and PHM

A key component in the medical industry’s drive to adopt value-based care is health insurance. Although I’m not an expert on health insurance, I’ve delved into the topic a fair amount on this blog, mainly focusing on government-provided insurance like Medicare and Medicaid with only a passing reference to private insurance. This is because the […]

What is a PCMH?

It seems like the term “Patient-Centered Medical Home,” or PCMH, has been getting a lot of attention lately, particularly in discussions related to value-based care. For that reason, as the first installment in my new “What Is?” series, I’d like to focus on this concept. So what is a PCMH? According to the National Committee […]